Business schools also are beginning to address personal knowledge management through their curricula. At UCLA, Jason Frand, assistant dean and director of computing and information services at the Anderson Graduate School of Management, teaches a mandatory course for incoming MBA students. He instructs students in developing a mental map of the knowledge with which they work, creating an organizational structure to facilitate finding and relating personal and professional information, and using technology to augment their memory and enhance their natural abilities.

Tool talk
In this information-saturated environment, handling information effectively is imperative. Applied to a solid base of techniques, personal knowledge management tools can help individuals to develop such skills.

While earning a doctorate in industrial engineering in 1997, Namchul Do (now a senior systems analyst at Volvo Construction Equipment in Changwon, South Korea) developed his own method of managing the life cycle of personal knowledge. He maintains a Web site hosted free of charge by his Internet service provider and uses a Korean-language search engine, also free, to track material that he stores on his site.

"Managing information means storing it without losing accessibility," says Do, who uses the Web to store and retrieve everything from articles and programming tips to drawings of complex engineering processes. "It helps me to produce knowledge assets such as technical writings, academic publications and even software systems," he adds.

As yet, no one has defined a market for PKM products, notes Joe Batista, chief creatologist at Compaq Computer Corp. in Houston, who tries to keep his company current with trends such as information overload. "The concept touches on something nobody has really talked about yet," he says. "Because of the overload of artifacts—any kind of data, information or knowledge in any file format—people need personal structure and knowledge management systems that can filter, categorize, assimilate, search, uncover and reorient them in their business situation."

Nevertheless, there are dozens of individually affordable products, from applications that index documents on your hard drive for faster search and retrieval to metasearch engines for the Web, collaboration services and innovative ways to organize, present and share knowledge. Many of these tools are free, provided to entice interest in enterprise sales, deliver banner ads or generate click-through revenue. 

Compaq’s Batista, for example, keeps about 12GB of work, representing five years’ worth of information, on the hard disk of his portable computer and uses Tracker from Enfish Technology Inc. to index, find and view files in multiple formats. "I can traverse the entire intellectual capital repository to get what I need," he says. But he adds that core tracking and searching features "need more enablers so I can work more efficiently and increase my personal bandwidth." He points to Enfish Onespace, the free successor to Tracker, as a step in the right direction because it can act on information, such as buying a gift at the click of a button when notified of a contact’s birthday.

"Personal knowledge management tools augment our personalized memory system," says Randy M. Kaplan, president of Accsys Corp., a knowledge engineering consultant in Westchester, Pa., that helps CEOs to deal with information overload. However, Kaplan emphasizes that, just as companies should do with enterprise knowledge management, users must examine their behaviors before they choose tools.

"I learned early on that if I introduce tools up front, they get lost in geekdom," Kaplan says. "My approach is to take a look at what they are doing and how to leverage that into more efficient behaviors. You have to be careful picking the tool because we all have different hands and eyes."

Kaplan explains his own PKM system as an example. He says he has saved just about everything he has written or read over the last 10 years, much of which is on paper. He scans those pages into a document manager, then uses Adobe Capture to recognize and structure the text in Acrobat format. Now Kaplan has a 700MB database of articles and information burned onto a CD that goes everywhere he goes.

Kaplan refers to the contents of this CD as "potential knowledge." He uses an application called dtSearch Desktop from dtSearch Corp. to index the contents of his personal repository and perform quick searches of it. Information Kaplan needs to have at his fingertips he transfers to his Apple Newton. He says that this discontinued product is more searchable than current personal digital assistants (PDAs). "It’s integrated with my life for taking notes and getting on the Web, and I can sync information into and out of it," he explains.

The salient point here is that it is better to integrate a tool—even an old one—into your knowledge handling habits rather than let a tool dictate how you work. In fact, the idiosyncratic nature of PKM, which often evolves from one person’s comfortable behavior and the resources at hand, is a defining characteristic of this emerging practice.

Personal intellectual capital
Getting a grip on the shifting mass of information is an important tactic, but using PKM techniques and tools, individuals can go farther, to enhance their abilities and career potential. Effectively managed personal knowledge assets become the currency of personal intellectual capital. This observation leads to the recognition that PKM is not a solitary activity but a social one, says Jon Sidoli, principal of Knovus Communications, in Irvine, Calif.

"There’s a personal paradigm shift that says I am more of a node on the network than anything else," Sidoli says. "Work is getting more fluid and serial. Whether or not he is an employee, the individual knowledge worker [IKW] needs to look at himself as an enterprise of one in a community of many. It’s what you know, who you know and what they know."

Although IKWs’ market value is based on how "smart" they are, skills today become obsolete quickly. Lasting value, Sidoli argues, is based on "agile learning" and the ability to tap into networks of knowledge, business, social groups and technology to constantly renew those skills. In return, the IKW is expected to share learning with others.

An IKW has to integrate all four types of network to build personal value. "Knowledge is key because you are selling knowledge in your business networks and generating and sharing it in social networks," Sidoli explains. He advises people to recognize communities of practice as knowledge networks and take advantage of them by joining professional and special interest groups. "Through the sharing of your own knowledge—while earning trust and respect—an individual builds a personal brand which increases his or her value in the organization or the job market," he says.

Sidoli points to his own history as an example. A few years ago when he became interested in KM, he had sold his Web development company and given up his job as the creative director of a multimedia firm. He put himself through a process he now describes as a personal knowledge audit by asking himself questions such as:

• What are my core goals and values?

• What is my core competence and where do I need to be?

• Where are my network strengths?

• Are they balanced?

• What is the next thing?

He began to read up on the subject, attending conferences and workshops and participating in online and face-to-face knowledge networks such as the knowledge ecology group run by George Pór of Community Intelligence Labs in Soquel, Calif. Since Sidoli didn’t have a "brand" as a consultant, he began to teach online courses, integrating KM with his previous expertise, publishing online newsletters and writing columns for actlikeanowner.com, which counsels business technology professionals.

"I didn’t have a background in organizational development or information technology but I could write, so I concentrated on that," he recalls. Eventually he began working for a consulting firm that was helping a large corporation to improve its overall brand through better internal communications and by using PKM to instill a culture of knowledge sharing.

The person in the organization
Despite its emphasis on the individual, even personal KM comes down to sharing knowledge and adding value to organizations that depend on their intellectual capital. "While all industries are knowledge-based, personal knowledge capabilities are critical to professional services such as law, consulting and investment banking, which obviously depend on the capabilities of knowledge workers, both individually and working together," says Dawson of Advanced Human Technologies.

In the workplace, effective PKM speeds information processing, lowers absenteeism, streamlines operational costs and improves workplace performance and competitiveness, says Open Connect’s Hyams. These things are good for both the individual and the company. "Personal knowledge management is team-oriented," he says. "Individual skills help the team produce and create." Hyams insists that corporate KM programs can’t succeed unless knowledge workers have knowledge management skills.

In fact, it might be preferable to build a knowledge management system upward from the individual and out through the entire organization rather than from the top down. Such a strategy might enable a company to sidestep typical problems of implementing enterprise KM such as the expense and difficulty of deployment and the incentives necessary to encourage participation.

Ray Edwards, managing director for professional services at Digital Lighthouse, a consultancy in Englewood, Colo., compares the enterprise to a chain that’s only as strong as its weakest link. He suggests that PKM can be the basis for the success of enterprise KM. "If companies would push, encourage and facilitate PKM first, they would probably find that EKM becomes a matter of fact rather than an effort," Edwards says. "If we foster PKM at the root level of an organization, the spin-off effects are probably more efficiency, responsiveness, accuracy and retention."